Okay so I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I feel like everyone's still stuck on the "which model is best" debate when there's a completely different cost problem creeping up on companies actually deploying this stuff.
It's not the model. it's the steps.
Like... a browser agent doing something that sounds simple: fill out a form, grab data from a dashboard, submit a thing. that's not 3 steps. that's observe, click, wait, observe again, oh there's a modal now, handle that, screenshot is stale, retry, login broke, start over. easily 30-50 tool calls for a task a human would do in 90 seconds.
At a small scale you don't care. annoying but whatever. at company scale? If you're running agents across customer ops, internal tooling, research, travel booking, job pipelines, etc., that inefficiency compounds really fast.
I came across something called ego lite which apparently takes a different approach: isolated sessions per task, reusable login state, better page snapshots, JS-level orchestration so agents can chain actions instead of calling tiny tools one by one. they're claiming 20-50% faster completion on comparable tasks which honestly if true is not a small number when you're paying per token per call.
idk maybe I'm in the weeds on this and most companies aren't at the scale where it bites yet. but it feels like one of those things where by the time people notice the bill, the architecture decisions are already locked in.
the smartest model running in a bad environment is still a slow expensive agent.
Anyone else actually tracking execution efficiency as a real cost metric or is it still mostly vibes and benchmarks out there?
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